Peg Duthie's Blog, page 57

Charleston: Cabbage Row Shoppe

I was insisting to the Beautiful Young Man late last night that I have a heart of stone -- specifically because I will not ride with panniers on my bike every day just in case I come across a puppy in need of rescuing (long story) -- and he was laughing at me at length, because it is true that I can be somewhat daft about doggies, especially when they happen to be a mongrel named Abby. And it is also true that I tend to pause (paws!) for business that set out water bowls on the sidewalk:



So when I saw this in front of a needlepoint shop in Charleston, I went inside, where I was greeted eagerly:



I didn't take pictures of the designs on display, but I was impressed at the plethora of canvases of dogs ready for a more experienced needlepointer to tackle. It being almost Christmas at the time, there were also plenty of holiday designs on offer at the time.

(I was crazy about needlepoint in 7th grade, to the extent of designing my own projects, but then got caught up in other obsessions. But the store had a handful of beginner-appropriate kits available, including a coin purse with a sunflower design, so I picked that up for some future holiday...)


Cabbage Row Shoppe
Note the palmettos on the sidewalk as well -- they're very much an emblem of the Holy City. (The cocktail napkins at 82 Queen have palmettos on them, and I'm sure they're in a bunch of other logos as well.)

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soufflé

We had too many oranges and eggs in the house, so last night I tried to make an orange soufflé. Alas, it was seriously undercooked underneath the crust. (It's edible enough for breakfast, but that wasn't the idea.) Things to try next time:

(1) Adjust the recipe. I didn't realize it was for a 2-quart dish (mine is 1.5 qt.) until I'd already put the batter in the oven.
(2) Be less cautious about blending the egg whites with the base.
(3) Plan on leaving the soufflé in the oven for 40 minutes instead of 25 (but start testing at 30).

(Then again, I don't usually inadvertently stock too many eggs, so I don't know when I'm going to feel like trying this again. Stovetop pudding is far simpler, even from scratch, and I live within walking distance of both an excellent bakery and a French bistro.)

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Kamman and Charleston

[I will probably be posting a fair bit about Charleston here over the next two weeks, because: work will be riding my tail, which means I won't be doing much in the way of extracurriculars; I need to organize my notes and snapshots anyway; some tweeps may be heading there next month for the Family Circle Cup (women's tennis); and I hope to go back in 2014 to see some tennis (there's also a challenger-level tournament there) and visit more Revolutionary War-related sites (including getting a drink at McCrady's, which I didn't manage back in November. George Washington attended a banquet there).]

I learned two new English words while reading Madeleine Kamman's introduction to oysters in The New Making of a Cook (p. 668): midden and iodic. I also learned about the claires for French-farmed oysters: "fattening ponds watered by the regular tides and in which the oysters develop to their market size."

Anyway, I was looking this up because I was revising an old poem about oysters, and this in turn reminded me of the great meal I had at Fleet Landing back in December, on my last morning in Charleston. I'd decided that I wanted to try she-crab soup before I left town, preferably someplace where I could also treat myself to a platter of good oysters, and a local oysterman on Yelp recommended Fleet Landing.

The soup and the shellfish were both wonderful, and so was the view from my seat:



( more photos under the cut )

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two takes on my neighborhood

Jim Jean:

Not to get too deep, but East Nashville is so diverse. On one side of the street you got dudes in a penthouse with a Porsche, and then you still have your trash can stolen by your neighbor, and your neighbors are shooting each other next door. You can also drink beer in the passenger seat of a car, which is pretty rad.

From an East Nashvillian profile of the 5 Spot (January issue):

Collinsworth knew East Nashville was a good thing when he visited in the summer of 1999. He was dragged into the now-defunct Radio Café by the late Skip Litz, local soundman and East Nashville fixture. There was a couple onstage playing some cover tunes -- Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Chuck Berry -- for a handful of patrons. They had a Dylan songbook with them and would ask the audience to call out page numbers before proceeding to play the selected song. "Come to find out, that couple was Gillian Welch and David Rawlings as The Esquires," Collinsworth says. “It was then and there that I decided to move to Nashville."

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"curiosity and mental activity"

A page of a Dorothy L. Sayers manuscript that was on display at the Karpeles Museum in Charleston, December 2012

The Karpeles is located in what used to be a church in one of the less affluent neighborhoods of downtown Charleston; the balcony still contains the facade of an ornate organ. I visited the branch in Jacksonville as well; the displays tend to be on the amateur side (lots of exclamation points and other stylistic quirks), but photographs are allowed and it was delightful getting so close to draft pages of Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, John Adams's correspondence (including his apology for pages scribbled on by a granddaughter), and other treasures.

(This exhibit closed at the end of December, but there's now one on Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini at the Karpeles in Newburgh, NY, to the end of April.)

Back to my current manuscripts and spreadsheets...

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Yann Martel

The author of Life of Pi is speaking in Nashville this Saturday, so there's a feature on him by Fernanda Moore at Chapter 16 that was reprinted in Monday's City Paper. I was struck by this exchange on criticism:

Chapter 16: Every artist must find a way to cope with critical opinion, but you have encountered an unusually huge range of reactions--reviews which are absolutely transcendent, as well as reviews that are scathing. How do you account for the extremes of opinion that your work seems to inspire?

Yann Martel: I mostly ignore critical opinion, good and bad. Art is a gift, the making of it, the receiving of it. So, like every artist, I create and then I give. What the world does with my gift--raise it up high or cast it down--is not my affair. For example, Beatrice and Virgil received an awful review from The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani. She positively hated the novel, as did the reviewers for The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle

And also:

Any work of art is a co-creation between the artist and the reader/viewer/spectator. My interpretation of Pi is just one reading among many possible readings, and it should not have any more weight because I'm its author. Having said that, I don't see the point in making less of life. It’s short enough as it is, so why not see more in it? Why not make leaps of faith?

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clippings: reproductive justice

"Did you just send that woman to a church to get help with an abortion?"

"Yes. Yes, I did."

- Darcy Baxter, a Unitarian chaplain, writes about trying to find options for a woman living 500 miles from the nearest abortion provider

In the March 2013 issue of Vogue, Katherine Bernard writes about Saundra Pelletier and WomanCareGlobal, which is taking a "Robin Hood approach" to making contraception available in developing countries. "We make a profit in markets like Ghana and Kenya." A striking detail: "$1,000 can buy 100 women in the developing world one year's worth of contraceptives."

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finding new places for things

It's been a week of moving things along -- I found a buyer for my stepdancing shoes, put a number of cards in the mail, shredded heaps of ancient receipts and notes, and printed out the customs form for a package to Canada.

I also finally unpacked a tote bag I'd brought home from my mother's back in 2008.



I didn't think to make a list until I was almost done, so it's not complete, but suffice it to say that the jumble stirred up all sorts of emotions. As I prepared her house for sale, I sent most of her sewing and craft supplies to a school that I thought would use them, but these were among the things that I imagined someday using:

* a postal pencil
* long knitting needles
* short pink knitting needles (the ones I used as a child)
* various buttons, hooks, and sewing needles
* thread in basic colors (and one spool of a lime-ish green)
* the leftover lace from an apron I made in one of my high school home ec classes
* a 1995 penny
* a roll of brown packing tape
* a roll of strapping tape

In my professional and volunteer circles, I have a reputation for being organized and decisive. As the long-suffering BYM can tell you, it's a different story at home. I'm slowly paring down the masses of papers and backlog of books, but it's tricky territory. Historian Me clenches her teeth as receipts and notes and photos hit the bin. Realist Me recognizes that what I save will still end up on the curb if I get hit by a bus tomorrow (even the books I've edited and the journals containing my poems -- the BYM is not sentimental in that way). I've been reading the entries at Unclutterer on inherited clutter, and I'm way more self-aware than I was even half a year ago about what I make time for, and what I won't get around to.

But it's still not easy saying farewell to those other selves. Although having company certainly brightens the present:



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an intriguing item

...in the March 2013 issue of Vogue:

When they do run [for Congress], [women] enjoy the same success rate as men, and when they win, their impact is disproportionate to their numbers. It's because, says a senator, "women don't get elected by putting on a flight suit and swaggering across a flight deck. They get elected by getting things accomplished, and that carries through in how they govern." Congresswomen consistently outperform men on a practical level. When it comes to winning Federal funds and support for the district, it is much better to have a woman fighting on your behalf. Political scientists have calculated that the bonus to constituents in electing a woman legislator runs to about $88 per head in government spending.

- Amanda Foreman, "The Female Factor"

[Claims like these make me long for footnotes...]

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President Andrew Johnson

When I was a child, I had a coloring book on the presidents of the United States. One of the details that stayed with me was that of Andrew Johnson being buried with a copy of the U.S. Constitution placed beneath his head.

So, thirty-odd years later, I drove to what is now the Andrew Johnson National Cemetery to pay my respects. I parked at Monument Hill, spent some time with the graves there, and then walked around. There was much to ponder among the hundreds of other headstones there.

( Photos under the cut; click on them to enlarge )

Earlier that day, I'd walked around the museum buildings on the national historic site. I was especially taken with the depiction of Johnson as a Greeneville tailor (and budding politician), listening to the locals as he worked:



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